Cybersecurity, music & upcoming games.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the belief that AI is going to dominate everything and make most jobs obsolete (shout-out to my cousin for fully believing that) and while I do not at all think that the hype around AI has anything to do with any actual value it offers it does at the very least seem like some employers buying into the hype might mean in the short term it actually will take your job.

Not in the sense that they hired an actual artificial intelligence to do your job, but in the sense that a lot of people that are in management positions are not in a position to comment on the value of so many of the jobs they outsource or oversee in their day to day. If your manager is fully convinced that AI can design or code just as well as any human can and is heavily focused on lowering expenditure as much as possible rather than actually having the job done correctly… well, you’re gonna have a bad time.

The same way that Upwork/Fiverr devalue the work of designers and artists in the eyes of many natural bargain hunters in the world, OpenAI and other companies jumping on the hype train along with them seem to have convinced a great many people that what we call AI right now is actually thinking like a human being. What’s the difference between feeding an insane amount of data into something coded to pretend to think and being inspired as an actual person by a great many variables that can’t be boiled down into a prompt you ask? Everything, you idiot.

I’ll do a full blog post about AI and the specifics of it another time, maybe even a little video essay or two if I get the time. While thinking about this anyway, in my view one of the industries that simply can’t become obsolete is that of Cybersecurity. The reason I believe this is because if things are becoming more and more connected, online, remotely accessible and now influenced by somewhat autonomous AI programs then that means there’s going to be an ever-expanding scope of things that an expert in such a topic might be needed to protect and educate the public about. The more I live the more vectors for attack I see and the more data is being collected by so many applications that often mishandle that data.

I don’t think any industry can be completely taken over by AI if there are enough assets on the line, because large language models and neural networks are simply not reliable enough yet to really trust them with anything extremely valuable. It’s a tool that I believe is great at doing a mediocre job at stuff it’s been told humans have already done and even then it does a relatively shitty job of that right now. Because of that, I signed up to do a Google Cybersecurity course and I’m going to get the full qualification from it and pursue a job in that industry. Wish me luck!

I’ve been enjoying a lot of music from Benny The Butcher, Vince Staples, ScHoolboy Q, Russ, Milc, Illmac, Ransom, 38 Spesh, Daniel Son, MAVI, Passwurdz, Grafh and Boldy James. Go listen to POLARIZING by Illmac right now and get ready for WNTR, because it’s coming.

As for games, anyone that’s been around a long time might know that I have an ungodly amount of hours spent playing competitively in Team Fortress 2 by Valve Software. Valve have made many iconic and innovative games over the years and when it came out that they had a new game coming called “Deadlock” I saw a lot of people saying that it didn’t seem very unique and so throwing it out before it was even close to done… Fast forward to getting an invite very recently and playing a couple games and I’m not gonna lie guys it’s pretty fucking cool.

It says when you open the game not to share too much about the game but I’ll just say it feels a little like an actually good SMITE with Fortnite’s 3rd person shooting and some Dota 2 elements. If anyone from Valve somehow sees this and gets mad please just contact me to say take this down and I’ll edit it! I’m looking at this game thinking I’ll probably spend quite a bit of time playing and maybe casting it as well so I’m hopeful (despite Valve letting us down quite a few times over the years) it’ll actually stick around and some of the lads from TF2 pop back up because I’m not gonna lie, I missed competitive gaming.

As you were!
konr